


and of their shadows deep

by Kt_fairy



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Bliss, F/M, Found Family, Friendship/Love, Gen, Mixed Chronology, Other, stealing gratuitously from yeats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26392147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kt_fairy/pseuds/Kt_fairy
Summary: “It is difficult to know what to say," Francis admitted after a minute or three of watching Ann wind the wool, his hands relaxing slowly into his lap, "when you are told you will cause an absence in someone’s life.”“You nod, and accept the warm sentiment of another,” Ann said matter-of-factly, casting a look at the wool hanging slack between Francis' fingers. "And you hold the wool taut!" she teased, "how else shall I have these gloves made in time.”James shifted at the sound of their merriment, Ann watching his eyes slip open to take in the scene before him. He smiled, warmth flickering over his expression as surely as the shadows from the fire; his gaze, still full of sleep, holding a softness in its depths that made Ann smile.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier & Lady Ann Ross, Captain Francis Crozier & Sir James Clark Ross, Lady Ann Ross/Sir James Clark Ross
Comments: 15
Kudos: 17
Collections: The Two Captains Fest 2020





	and of their shadows deep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rhosyndu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhosyndu/gifts).



> Rhosyndu - I'm not sure this is what you were hoping for, but I hope you like it! (and I'm sorry for my truly unhelpful prompts) 
> 
> Written for the prompt - _"dream of the soft look/ your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep" JCR/Crozier, JCR/Anne, Crozier/Sophia;_
> 
> Thank you MsKingBean for, as always, getting things shipshape and Bristol fashion.

**-1850**

Ann did not know what to expect when she stepped onto the dockside at Chatham.

Oh, she knew what to expect from a dockyard. It was all familiar to her; the smells, the noise, the constant activity that had once startled her so, country girl that she had been. For she was married to a sailor afterall. One who went to sea no more but could not be parted from it, and nor would she wish him to be. 

Ann understood how it settled in the bones of a man. Sometimes she fancied it had settled in hers too, with how she had looked to it and pondered its dangers when James had been in the Antarctic; and how her thoughts had wondered northward over these recent four years, to those icy waters that had kept dear Frank from them.

She picked up the hem of her skirts as she strode through the puddles and detritus that gathered in even the tidiest of ports, eyes turned towards the low shape of _Enterprise_ safe in her moorings. _Investigator_ was her shadow, anchored beside her in the Medway, their masts clear against the bright, towering clouds, like pen lines on a crisp white page.

The ship's had passed through Aberdeen a week past, it had been reported in the Times, but no news of Sir John came. Nor had any note or letter come from her husband, who had promised her he would send word the moment they reached British soil.

Ann would allow for the slowness of the post, or that the promise might have been forgotten after a year - she was no tyrant - but this silence worried her. She knew her husband, and she knew Frank. He would have replied to the letter she had sent north with James, especially if the expedition were carrying on to the Bering strait, as he would never wish to cause her concern. 

This trepidation, which had grown in her as the days passed until she could almost feel the jagged, foreboding shape of it, had caused her to set out for Chatham alone, leaving her children at home. They had protested and whined, wishing to see their father and the ships, but she would not be swayed. A thing she had regretted several times on the journey to Kent; for what wife would deprive her husband of seeing his children, or doubt the success of all he turned his mind to? What friend would allow such a feeling of doom as she felt for Francis?

Men she remembered from when the _Enterprise_ and _Investigator_ had departed last year, their faces pale and nipped from cold, tugged their forelocks as she passed, their eyes carefully averted when they parted before her.

One of the officers, M’Clintock, had just begun his descent of the gangplank when she came to the foot of it. He halted abruptly, expression rendered unreadable by the light of the sky behind him, and stepped back smartly as Ann began her own, independent ascent up onto _Enterprise._

The deck was in less of a bustle than when Ann had last stood upon it, clear of animals and busy men. The ship swayed gently, even at anchor, and Ann gripped the edge of the gunwale for a moment as her clenching, apprehensive stomach rolled along with _Enterprise._

"Lady Ross -- " M'Clintock began, and Ann flicked her gaze up to look into his guarded eyes. He hesitated, then bowed his head. "We did not expect you."

"I have journeyed unannounced," she explained. "Even to my husband."

M'Clintock nodded, making to say something but visibly deciding against it, and Ann felt that dread in her chest begin to push up into her throat. 

"He will be glad of your company, as will we all," he said quietly, gallantly, gaze shifting towards the bow as sure footsteps, that she would know anywhere, came quickly towards them.

M'Clintock stepped politely away when Ann turned towards the proud figure of her husband. He took her gloved hands in his, pressing his lips to her fingers before laying a loving kiss to her cheek, murmuring how he had missed her.

Ann smiled, joy soaring through her at having her James back, and yet she knew something was wrong. She could see it in the crew, in M'Clintock's manner, and feel it in the strain threaded through James’ posture when he stepped back so they might look at one another. 

He seemed… dulled. The brightness of his piercing gaze diminished, a sadness that might crush a lesser man lingering in the shadows of his careworn face.

No. Ann had not known what to expect when she came to Chatham. But she had known, deep down in her shivering heart, that it would be this.

  
  


* ***** *

**-1845**

“May I say, Frank, that I will miss your company terribly when you set off northwards.”

Her voice, pitched quietly as it was, cut through the peace of the parlour and startled Francis, causing him to almost drop the spool of dark grey wool he was patiently holding for Ann. He had been utterly lost in the depths of his thoughts, the low burning fire lighting the pensive weight on his brow that cleared when he tipped his head back to give Ann a bashful smile; the footstool he was sitting upon creaked softly at the movement of his fidgeting legs.

“I - it is a fine feeling to know one shall be missed, but to trouble others -- “

“Oh now,” Ann tutted, setting down the half wound skein into her lap. “Francis, I will not hear you call yourself either a bother or a trouble,” she said in a low, stern voice, reaching out her leg to kick him lightly with her slippered foot. “You are neither. So say I, and so would James,” she nodded to her husband who was snoring quietly in his chair, book laying open in his lap. “If he were awake.”

"Too much excitement watching the sea trials today," Francis said lightly, brow arched as he threw a glance back at James.

Ann shook her head, "all that puffing and rattling of that engine on _Terror_. It feels very unhealthy, Francis." 

"Let us hope it is worth it," he said, tone wholly unconvinced, and Ann hummed in agreement.

“It is difficult to know what to say," Francis admitted after a minute or three of watching Ann wind the wool, his hands relaxing slowly into his lap, "when you are told you will cause an absence in someone’s life.”

“You nod, and accept the warm sentiment of another,” Ann said matter-of-factly, casting a look at the wool hanging slack between Francis' fingers. "And you hold the wool taut!" she teased, "how else shall I have these gloves made in time.”

James shifted at the sound of their merriment, Ann watching his eyes slip open to take in the scene before him. He smiled, warmth flickering over his expression as surely as the shadows from the fire; his gaze, still full of sleep, holding a softness in its depths that made Ann smile. 

This was true fulfilment, she thought. This house in Blackheath might be close and airless, but her son was safe asleep upstairs, the babe in her belly laying quiet, and her husband was at rest before the fire in their tidy parlour, in the company of his oldest and closest friend. _Their_ dearest friend. Many husbands expected their wives to hold their friends in a certain, proper regard, and when it came to Captain Crozier it was safe to say that Ann had liked him almost at once. For how could a man who her husband had such affection for, and who was so warm to him in return, fail to be like a brother to her. 

James closed his book, laying it on his thigh as he stretched out one leg, and then the other. “We can’t have you freezing, old man. Need to keep you as uncomfortably warm as we do here.”

Francis peered over his shoulder at him, "I would not call your wife's knitting _uncomfortable_ , James."

"I did not,"James huffed as he took a half-hearted swipe at Francis with his book, missing him entirely, "mean that."

Ann smiled to herself as she continued her winding. It was such a shame to be parted so soon after Francis’ return from Italy. He was so _good_ for James, whose hands would shake sometimes, brought on by thoughts of Antarctica; yet it had not happened once since Francis had come to stay with them.

It would only be a year or two. James said so with such surety, Francis agreeing easily; the both of them reassuring her that the Arctic was not so perilous a place as the Antarctic, where they had returned from battered and shaken, but triumphant.

Frank would come back a man with many great discoveries under his belt, from both ends of God’s earth. And - Ann dearly hoped, as she watched the gladness in the men’s faces, that he might come back to them for a while, so they could go on as a family should. Together.

* ***** *

**-1847**

Concern had not touched Ann until she saw the charts on her husband’s desk in the study of Aston Abbots.

She knew what the great Antarctic continent looked like, having inspected every map and studied every detail when James had been sailing those treacherous waters. These charts, laying in an untidy pile on the leather topped desk, were of North America, the mass of channels and islands seeming as if the continent were shattering into the ocean. A drop of dread rolled down her spine as she looked over that impossible maze, that tangle of sea lanes where two ships, all alone, had been picking their way for two long years.

James had come barrelling in then, legs wide apart and bent in half to keep pace behind their son who was trying to run on unsteady little legs, shrieking with laughter. The sight was so enchanting that Ann put all thought of dread from her mind; yet spring became summer, then turned to autumn, and still no word came. 

Captains Bird and Parry came instead, talking long into the evening with her husband. Weather reports from Aberdeen and Inverness began to be delivered, bringing word from whalers about ice and frozen oceans, as did letters from Lady Jane; James pouring over the pages and pages of her neat handwriting with an uncertain look on his face, his hands trembling faintly.

He said there was no need for concern when she asked about it all. Laying a kiss to her hair and her cheek while he assured her the ships were the finest equipped and provisioned; that if it was an easy task then the Passage would have been found decades before.

And yet her husband's words did not calm her. It might have been natural feminine, maternal anxiousness, but she almost began to fret. Ann was not timid by nature. In fact James delighted (and her father often despaired) in her sure will and indefatigable mind, and she found herself becoming quite aggrieved at the situation. 

Her anxiousness was for all the men who had gone North, of course, yet - and it shamed her to admit - Ann knew she would not be so pensive if Francis was not out there with them. That James would not leave the bed in the middle of the night to pace the study if Frank were here. At home. Where he _should_ be. 

She let herself brood, one might say, although never before her children. Quiet moments saw her dwelling on it, and one night she managed, quite ridiculously she knew, to work herself into a fit of pique while affixing curling paper to her hair before bed.

“He was content enough with us, in Blackheath,” burst out of her chest, where it had been sitting heavily for the past hour.

James hummed in response, hardly listening as he was sat up in bed, peering at his book by candlelight. 

“The house was abominably hot and uncomfortable,” Ann went on, undeterred, “but we were all content together. I do not see why Frank had to go North.”

“My love…” James sighed, the sheets rustling behind her.  
  


“Exploring is a ‘young man’s game’, you said that to me when you came home from the Antarctic, and yet they have put a young man as _third_ in command. There is no war to fight, and so there was no need to uproot men, who have served their country well, from their deserved rest!”

“Fitzjames is capable,” James said levelly, missing her point on purpose. “If he had been allowed to come south with us in ‘39, he would have had the experience needed to lead…”

“James. Do not tell me things I already know,” Ann turned from her mirror, cheeks heating either roused emotions. “There was a time, not so long past, when no-one had the experience,” she said sternly, softening at once when she saw the troubled lines on her husband’s brow. “Oh, my darling…” 

“Francis is the most tireless, truthful, and capable man I have ever had the honour to know,” James spoke softly, carefully. “He deserves a comfortable retirement, and I feel his absence, Ann. _Greatly_ ,” he looked at her, and something softened in his eyes. “Frank is my oldest and truest friend. But fortune’s expensive smile must be earned. Please try to understand, my dear, that there are some things a man must do. And we must respect both that, and Frank.”

Ann thought that was no answer at all, but could not bear to argue. Instead she rose to her feet and went to take her husband's hands, to kiss his weather worn fingers and try to ease the unhappiness she had brought to the forefront of his thoughts. 

He touched her chin and she brought her face up to receive a soft kiss, his unsteady hand running down her arm to cup her elbow. “All will be well. Frank will come back to us, and we shall all be content,” he touched the back of her cheek with his fingers. “How can I think of anything but hopeful things, when you are so very lovely.”

“ _James_ ,” Ann chided, delighted warmth running down to her toes. “My hair is in papers!”

“Then,” he smiled broadly, arm looping about her waist and holding her close to his strong chest. “I must do my best not to disturb them.”

  
  


* ***** *

**-1850**

A gull was crying out in the distance, the noise shrill and sharp and unfeeling. The sound far too cold for the soft light of the sunset that was tinging the clouds in a rosy flush, but bleak enough for the space Ann could feel in her chest.

_Enterprise_ was still and quiet, the creaking and sighing of her planking muted as if she too could feel the weight of this loss. The dockyard remained active, the murmur of activity and the calls of sailors feeling like a perversion when they encroached on the hush of the great cabin.

Ann could hardly countenance it, any of it, sitting at the stern gallery watching the pink twilight shift over the deck towards where her husband was hunched over in his chair.

He had been pulling at his hair with shaking hands, leaving it ragged and untidy, his face red and eyes watery with the silent grief that had overcome him like a surging tide. Ann had been unable to offer the comfort she should as his wife, merely twisting her handkerchief around and around in her fist; knowing but hardly understanding what she had been told. All felt muted, as if occurring on the other side of a locked door - the sharp, persistent anxiety of all her worries nothing against the horror of the truth.

“Dead and gone - all of them. I cannot…” James shook his head, a tremble running through his shoulders. 

She had met every officer set to go north with Sir John; they had bowed over her hand and spoken graciously to her, the light of adventure in their eyes that she had so loved in James’ once. They were dead, all of them, according to those local _Netsilik_ James had spoken to. And why should they lie? Why should they have lied about the last words Francis wished to pass on to those who came looking - dread words, devoid of the warmth and care she knew so well. 

“If I had gone earlier,” James was saying, “when Lady Jane first came warning of disaster. If I had not been so--”

“James,” Ann warned, clenching her hands tightly in her lap. “Do not.”

“-- I knew Sir John could not react to disaster, and I know very well how it lingers at every turn in the polar regions, but I thought Franci --”

“This will do no good,” Ann said firmly, her ringlets bouncing about her face when she jerked her head around towards her husband. “It will change nothing, James.”

There was a wildness in his eyes when he looked at her, quickly calming to the same shocked dullness she had seen on deck. Ann reached out to grasp his arm, eyes falling back to the deck, and to the rug beneath the table that needed a good beating. 

How could she be so heartless as to think such a useless thing? How could she care one jot about a rug? She tightened her grip on James’ arm; had her head been full of such ridiculous notions when all those men were suffering. Had she been caught up in little, domestic thoughts when her cherished friend, a brother to both her and her husband, had been…

Ann shut her eyes against an image of the looming, shattered ice that she knew only from books, of the desolate places that were little more to her than lines on a map. Frozen hardships she would never comprehend and so were all the more terrible. The darkness behind her eyelids only making it all so more worse, and so Ann opened eyes once more.

She forced herself to think of better times; of James - who was not a natural with very young children - dumping their infant son into Francis’ arms and being appalled at how easily Francis handled him. Of the first time James had introduced her to Francis, and his amusement at the clandestine nature of the meeting because Ann’s father had forbade her from any contact with James. 

Of their walks about Blackheath and their conversations over supper. Of sitting together in the parlour. Of her happiness then, and the soft contentment in her husband’s eyes that was now only shadows, deep and dark, cast by this impossible loss. 

That glad grace was only a memory now. Only a dream. Gone. Lost forever on barren, foreign soil.

Ann took a steadying breath, then another, and went to cradle her husbands’ head in her hands. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> My tumblr is [pianodoesterror](https://pianodoesterror.tumblr.com) if you want to come and say Hi.


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